Report: Millions in Tax Money Wasted on SPLC, Which Faces Federal Fraud and Money-laundering Charges

Since fiscal 2016, the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has collected almost $4 million in taxpayer money to spread hate under the guise of stopping the spread of hate.

Payments to the anti-white, anti-Christian outfit were nationwide, Open the Books revealed in a recent report.

The revelation follows a federal grand jury indictment in Alabama in connection with SPLC’s funding hate groups. The disgraced group faces charges of wire fraud, making false statements, and money laundering.

After the FBI ended its cooperation with the group, the indictment was yet another significant blow.

The Money

Discredited long ago as a money-making scam with offshore bank accounts, SPLC has received at least $3.85 million “as direct payments, or indirectly to help spread their teaching materials in America’s public-school classrooms,” Open the Books (OTB) disclosed.

That total includes $1.35 million “from school districts, states, cities, counties, universities and other public entities.”

And the payment didn’t come only from blue states. Florida and Kansas gave the outfit money, too.

But “incoming public revenue for SPLC peaked in FY 2021 thanks in part to Fulton County, Georgia,” OTB reported:

That county made the largest set of payments on August 6: three separate payments of $30,000; $6,262.00; and $3,019.37 for a total of $39,281.47. None of the payments include an explanation.

Several examples do include explanations, though. A $5,500 payment from Robbinsville Public Schools in New Jersey includes “Title Iv – Pur Prof Svcs,” a common abbreviation for “Title IV – Purchased Professional Services.”

Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act of 1965 (updated by the Every Student Succeeds Act) provides grants to K-12 schools for a range of academic enhancement purposes. Section A includes professional teacher trainings from outside experts (for “student support and academic enrichment”), while Part B includes hired instructors and after-school programs.

Another $4,000 payment from Chicago Public School District 299 includes the note, “For Credit Classes, Seminars, Workshops, Etc.” Again it indicates SPLC was spreading its materials and message in K-12 classrooms.

The report includes more about those types of payments.

But the “most troubling” handouts, OTB observed, were for SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” propaganda. Cincinnati public schools paid SPLC $2,000 for it. A suburb in Rochester, New York, wasted $4,000.

SPLC Shenanigans at University of Michigan

The ore OTB mined on the state level comes after its detailed report in December, which exposed how the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor was spending tax money from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, yet another worthless subsidiary of the federal Health and Human Services Department.

The university received a whopping $2.5 million for a dopey project called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE).”

“The project integrated ‘the Teaching Tolerance curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center’ into an existing local middle school program called Youth Empowerment Solutions,” OTB learned:

UM-Ann Arbor researchers said they would use a “group-randomized trial design in the summer programs across 6 middle schools” and “examine the effects of the curriculum on individual youths’ sense of empowerment, racist behaviors, and violent behavior.”

The “efficacy of the YES-ERACE” program would be tested “in a randomized design on empowered outcomes which will mediate the effects of YES-ERACE on perpetration of racist attitudes and behavior” and on a “model that predicts empowered outcomes will mediate perpetration of racism, and that YES-ERACE effects on aggressive and violent behavior will also be mediated by reducing perpetration of racism over time.” The curriculum included lessons on “white supremacy,” “media stereotypes,” “LBGTQ [sic] appreciation,” and “solidarity.”

Upshot: The grant was a complete waste of tax money. Overhead cost: $1,173,910, or 56 percent of the grant.

Its costs included these interesting details:

• $512,500 to pay schools to implement the project;

• $48,000 for a “racism [and] racial identity and adolescence” consultant;

• $16,000 for an “anti-racism” advisory board;

• $15,000 for office supplies and “swag for youth participants;”

• $5,000 for Teaching Tolerance “experts” to teach “anti-racism and cultural equity;” and,

• $3,400 for computers to run the program.

According to OTB, USASpending shows that the federal government is still pumping money into the wasteful program.

Federal Charges

Last month, a federal grand jury indicted SPLC on charges of wire fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The 14-page, 11-count federal indictment alleges that the group paid money to the American Nazi Party, two Ku Klux Klan groups, and the notorious Unite the Right group that protested in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The pro-communist outfit funded the groups with more than $3 million.

SPLC was revealed years ago to be little more than a money-making con game akin to phone scammers in India. For years, the outfit has been manufacturing preposterous claims that Nazis, racists, and other imaginary bogeymen were on the march and about to take over the country.

But, the indictment alleges, part of that con game was funding the very groups the SPLC claimed to be “fighting.”

The introduction summarized the group’s illegal activities this way:

Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (“field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website. The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia.… To covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities.

As OTB observed, SPLC called Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA a hate group before a deranged gunman murdered him on a college campus. SPLC also declared the Family Research Council a hate group, which inspired a lunatic to attempt a mass murder at FRC headquarters in 2012.

In October, FBI chief Kash Patel announced that the FBI had cut ties with SPLC.